Try to please everyone and you end up pleasing nobody. Even Lisa Nandy, who seems more alert than most of her rivals, has fallen into this trap.
The dismay the electorate showed for them last is being ignored. That makes it much harder for whoever becomes the Leader of the Opposition to establish any credibility.
“For the millions of people who desperately needed change at that general election – they still need that change.”
And by ranking Rayner second, they appear to agree that “Rebecca Long Bailey isn’t even the best Labour leader in her own flat”.
It is as if it had become a vehicle to help Blair redeem his reputation and popularity, lost after the Iraq War.
It is time for the Commons to stop telling us what it’s against and to show what it’s for, which ought to be: this deal.
Ronnie Campbell added that “this country is fed up with Parliament…it’s time we got a deal, and got it through.”
MPs would thus become the elected equivalents of the welfare scroungers of tabloid legend – dragging the reputation of Parliament even deeper into the mud.
Raab trod gingerly in Heseltine’s footsteps, while the Leader of the House presented the Shakespearean drama of politics.
“We have to move on. We have to find a way forward. And there’s now only one way. ‘Put it to the people’.”
In his need, Labour’s leader is turning for inspiration to a predecessor who will scarcely be at the top of his list of role models.
Brexit has changed much for them, but less than one might think – at least when it comes to their strategic position at Westminster.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Surrender Bill won’t just delay Brexit. It threatens to stop it altogether.
But there is method in his madness.
He says Starmer “keeps telling me how much he doesn’t like a blind Brexit, and yet what we have before the House is in essence, a blind motion…”